Sheldon Solomon - The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

Back of everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all-encompassing blackness. We need a life not correlated with deatha kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature. And so with most of us:a little irritable weaknesswill bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.

W ILLIAM J AMES ,

The Varieties of Religious Experience

On a rainy, gray day in december 1973, philosopher Sam Keen, writing for Psychology Today, trundled down the halls of a hospital in Burnaby, British Columbia, to interview a terminally ill cancer patient who doctors said had just days to live. When Keen entered the room, the dying man told him, with a touch of mortal irony: You are catching me in extremis. This is a test of everything Ive written about death. And Ive got a chance to show how one dieshow one accepts his death.

The man in the hospital bed was cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. Becker had devoted his academic career to writing books synthesizing insights from anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, religion, literature, and popular culture to get to the bottom of the ancient question What makes people act the way they do?

In his latest book, The Denial of Death, which he described as his first mature work, Becker concluded that human activity is driven largely by unconscious efforts to deny and transcend death. We build character and culture, he told Sam Keen, in order to shield ourselves from the devastating awareness of our underlying helplessness and the terror of our inevitable death. Now, lying on his deathbed, Becker explained that his lifes work had been about coming to terms with the grinning skull looking back at him.

Ernest Becker died on March 6, 1974, at the age of forty-nine. Like many visionaries, Becker died too young. Two months later, The Denial of Death was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Back in the late 1960s, Becker was an intellectual insurgent. He was immensely popular with students, who flocked to hear his lectures. However, colleagues and university administrators were not particularly enamored with an interdisciplinary thinker who drew together ideas from all corners of the academy, public discourse, and popular culture, and who challenged their academic and political orthodoxy.

Becker thus became a kind of academic vagabond, drifting from Syracuse University (19601963) to the University of California, Berkeley (1965), where students offered to pay his salary after the anthropology department declined to renew his contract. After a stint at San Francisco State (19671969), he found an academic home at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia (19691974), where he wrote the second edition of The Birth and Death of Meaning, The Denial of Death, and his posthumously published Escape from Evil.

A few years later, in the late 1970s, the three authors of this book met after enrolling in the doctoral program in experimental social psychology at the University of Kansas. We quickly discovered a shared interest in understanding the fundamental motivations that direct human behavior. Our studies and discussions led us to focus on two very basic human proclivities. First, we human beings are driven to protect our self-esteem. Second, we humans strongly desire to assert the superiority of our own group over other groups.

But we had no idea what underlies these prides and prejudices until we stumbled upon Beckers books as young professors in the early 1980s. Like the Rosetta Stone, they were to us a revelation. Mixing deep philosophical prose and straightforward laymans language, Becker explained how the fear of death guides human behavior. He illuminated many of the key social-psychological phenomena that we had for years been studying and teaching but without fully grasping. Suddenly, we had a way to understand why we so desperately crave self-esteem, and why we fear, loathe, and sometimes seek to obliterate people who are different from ourselves.

Brimming with youthful enthusiasm, we were excited to share Beckers ideas with fellow social psychologists at the 1984 meeting of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. There we introduced what we dubbed terror management theory in order to build on Beckers claim that people strive for meaningful and significant lives largely to manage the fear of death. The audience started drifting away as soon as we mentioned that our theory was influenced by sociology, anthropology, existential philosophy, and psychoanalysis. When we got to the ideas of Marx, Kierkegaard, Freud, and Becker, renowned psychologists were storming the conference room exits.

Bemused but undaunted, we prepared a paper for the American Psychological Associations flagship journal,